From the Editor
Luis Ayala
Balance
We’ve arrived at the half-way point of the year: the road ahead is as long as the road already traveled. One of the benefits of getting older, I think, is the ability to look at both the past and the future with a higher appreciation of how hard it is to understand, appreciate, seek and find balance.
Balance is an indispensable quality of greatness: great restaurants achieve it by focusing on the way they treat customers, how they prepare their dishes and how said dishes are presented to the eager diners. Great living spaces achieve their distinction by the way they harmoniously distribute or utilize empty or defined given areas. More specifically to the focus of this magazine, great rums need to find this balance between aromas, the thoughts they evoke, the realities delivered by the taste components, the packaging and the price. Great rum and cigar pairings capture the balance too, with the combined sum of the parts being greater than the individual quality of the components. In our lives, work-balance is critical for mental well-being and harmonious interfamily relations.
How balance is defined changes from one social group to another and from one industry to the next. What doesn’t change is how much true balance is appreciated by the end users, whenever it is achieved.
Looking at the past six months of the year, do you feel you lived them in balance? Hopefully the answer is ‘yes’ but, even if it isn’t, you still have the next 6 months to make corrections and bring the average for the year into balance.
The rum industry is buzzing around us: I haven’t seen this much R&D activity in the 25+ years I’ve been involved with rum. Brand producers and distributors are preparing for a very active summer, followed by a very promising OND (October, November and December). Let’s all take a few moments as often as possible to make sure we are in balance, so that all our actions deliver the best possible experience to everyone touched by our products or services.
Cheers!
Luis Ayala, Editor and Publisher